Danger? We can't resist the dark side

November 09, 2005|By Julia Keller, Tribune cultural critic

If the world didn't have alleys, Freud would have invented them.

Alleys are a literal version of the dark subconscious: Largely hidden from the world most of the time; brimming with the things from which we normally recoil; the repository for what we think we've finally -- finally! -- discarded; incubator of shadows; nesting place for grisly intentions.

Not only that, but alleys are dead-bang scary too.

Our language about alleys betrays our unease. "I think he's OK," we say, "but I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley." The traditional slang for a harrowingly unsafe medical procedure which some desperate women feel they must undergo, a ghastly last resort, is "a back-alley abortion."

Alleys reek with menace. Downtown, the fire escapes clamped to building backsides can resemble, in the dusky dim light, medieval torture devices, an excess of cruelly stubborn iron twisted into diabolical shapes. In the neighborhoods, alleys at night are tunnels of unknown peril; lined by the backs of houses -- the neglected, forgotten parts -- and by thrown-out couches and overfed garbage cans and flecks of glass from smashed beer bottles that wink in the moonlight like precious gems.

Everything we fear and fear deeply can be found in alleys, like some deliberate checklist of mental morbidities: scuttling creatures (rats); crime (isolated locations that delight muggers, murderers and other purveyors of mayhem); disease (caused by filth); death.

And yet if you stand at the mouth of an alley, just at the point where it intersects with some saner, more public place, and you stare down that lane of unknown nastiness and sordid complication, there is this: Alleys are irresistible.

For all of their darkness and demonic ickiness, for all of the garbage and narrow nefariousness, they're also undeniably fetching.

Alleys are like the bad boys in high school, like the hoodlum girls. The rule-breakers. The ones who wear black and sneer at authority. Alleys are like geographical Goth.

You're vaguely afraid of them, but you can't stay away from them, either. And sometimes you wish you could be more like them, you with your straight A's and polished shoes and perfect attendance record.

Alleys, then, are endlessly alluring. What other mysteries are left to us in this polite, well-regulated, OSHA-approved, overly organized and completely predictable world of planned communities and zealously zoned urban centers? Whither darkness, in the great blaze of artificial light that explodes from our cities? Is this why we crave the occasional solace of places furred with blackness and bristling with menace, places remote and unknown, places bordered by the backsides and stub-ends of the daylight world?